Afghanistan: Militias Governance and their Disputed Leadership (Taliban, ISIS, US Proxy Militais, Extrajudicial Killings, War Crimes and Enforced Disappearances)

By Musa Khan Jalalzai

Writers and analysts have uncovered the illegal role of private militias’ commanders in Afghanistan. These commanders and self-styled leaders were driven overwhelmingly by their personal power, and they were not only considered illegitimate on the domestic political scene, and viewed as irrelevant. The present Afghan government is a mix of all types of its efforts, including war criminals, and militia commanders who smuggle narcotics, drugs, arm, and kill women and children. War criminals and militias commanders have developed complex survival and legitimation strategies beyond their territorial realms. After years of its establishment, the Afghan local police (ALP) was undermined due to its failure to stabilize remote regions of the country. The US proxy militias are the source of consternation. The US Army established an incompetent intelligence agency (NDS) to serve its interest. The NDS established regional militias to support the CIA and Pentagon war mission against the people of the country. The NDS established Unit-01 for Central Region, Unit-02 for Eastern Region, Unit-03 for Southern Region, and Unit-04, as a Khost Protection Force (KPF), and committed war crimes in these regions with the support of the US Army and CIA. This book has documented the role of all internal and external actors, warlords and stakeholders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: VIJ Books (India) Pty Ltd
• Release date: Feb 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9789390439546

Book preview

Introduction

In Asia and the Middle East, the role of proxy militias have been of great importance since 2001. From assassins and mercenaries to bounty markers and paramilitary organizations, all are sponsored by states to further their national security interests. Analyst and editor Joshua Duke (06 August 2020) views the operational mechanism of these militias with different perspective; Assassination has commonly been used as a form of political terrorism. From a historical context, assassinations have been used to instigate larger movements, such as insurrections, rebellions, revolutions, and other events over time designed to conquer a social system or ideology of an era or region on Earth. In Afghanistan, the US and NATO proxy militias were also established to kill and kidnap innocent Afghans. The services and expertise offered by these militias are typically similar to those of governmental security, military or police forces in the country, but they are not answerable to the Defence Ministry. As substantiated by their diverse role, private militias acted for the CIA, NATO members and non-ally states. Killed and looted the US army and kidnapped young children and women with impunity. Nevertheless, they have also committed war crimes in night raids, destroyed houses, kidnapped young girls, women and boys and damaged national critical infrastructure.

Afghanistan is still run by proxy militias of different internal and external stakeholders. In October 2015, Kunduz was destroyed by these militias which looted banks, markets and houses. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and emergence of Mujahideen’s militias in Pakistan and Iran, regional powers, US, NATO and the Arab world’s military experts arrived in Pakistan to train, support, and arm every terrorist and extremist group to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan.

Afghan communist governments also established several proxy militias to counter the Mujahideen insurgency, but these militias couldn’t play effectively due to the lack of proper training and modern weapons. The Dostum militia (Gillam Jam) was better trained by the government-purveyed weapons and financial resources to operate across the country. During the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s, Dostum supported Afghan National Army and the regional commander of the country’s north, commanding about 20,000 troops mostly Uzbeks. In 1992, he unhorsed Dr. Najibullah government, joined the Mujahideen militias, and established the Junbish Milli party to play a political role in future government. At present, Dostum was maintaining a strong militia of 40,000 men-adorned with modern and sophisticated weapons. Mr. Dostum played a crucial role in crushing the Mujahideen in several Northern districts, but later on became part of civil war. Analyst and expert Niels Terpstra noted important points of civil war after the Soviet withdrawal:

The withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989 created a power vacuum. Political fragmentation and continued violence characterized the 1989–1994 period. Afghanistan descended into a brutal civil war between rivalling mujahideen groups and other strongmen. The war against the Soviet Union had already lasted for ten years, and its impact on Afghan society was severe. An estimated one to two million Afghans were killed during the war and land mines and indiscriminate bombing injured hundreds of thousands more. Hence, a whole generation grew up as refugees or as fighters. With the Soviet Union gone, much of the territory was open to armed opportunists and radical preachers. Local armed groups continued to fight over land, water sources, and mountain passes at different localities. The various mujahideen groups became either players in the battle for Kabul or localized armed actors. The multitude of commanders increasingly tolerated their fighters to loot and rape the civilian population, partly due to their inability to pay salaries and as an incentive to keep them fighting. The key individuals that would eventually establish the Taliban as a separate movement in 1994 were relatively passive between 1989 and 1994. Those who would come to form the senior leadership after 1994 used to be village mullahs or worked in religious education and therefore returned to their home villages or original madrassas. Some mujahideen, however, reconvened in 1993 and 1994 to discuss the chaotic situation in Kandahar. The dynamics of rebel governance and rebel legitimacy, however, do not exist in isolation from other powerful actors. The actions/responses of the state are relevant to the analysis of rebel legitimacy as well. Powerful external actors may also influence the relations between armed groups and civilians. Much research has been devoted to the effects of external support to rebel groups and the attempts of rebel groups to acquire international legitimacy and/or recognition. In this article, I shift the perspective and demonstrate how powerful external actors that support the incumbent government shape (though less directly) the dynamics of rebel governance and rebel legitimacy. The presence of foreign enemy forces is an important source of legitimacy for rebel groups and has remained relatively under-studied in the literature on rebel governance. Rebel legitimacy is a function of present-day events but also of prior armed conflicts and societal tensions. As Schröder and Schmidt observe, ‘the most important code of the legitimation of war is its historicity.

All these private militias of communist and Mujahideen era are still dancing to different tangos in all provinces of Afghanistan. They receive financial support from different channels-challenging territorial authority of the national army of the country. The role of warlords and their political and economic role have been highlighted by Analyst and researcher, Romain Malejacq. He has noted the use of these militias by states against their own alienated citizen to stabilize their territories:

States in turn have an interest in using the warlords’ ability to arbitrage, that is, to ‘take advantage of a price differential for political, economic, and cultural goods across terrains’ as part of their own extraversion strategies. While warlords are tied to their previous territorial control, their local authority gives them leverage among international actors. They take advantage of the complexity and heterogeneity of the international system, in which many competing actors with a variety of domestic and foreign policy agendas coexist and operate in a system where ‘subjects are governed by a complex hodgepodge of foreign powers, international and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and domestic institutions’. Though warlords interact with a constellation of national and international actors who rigidly structure the political environment, they have the ability to operate and exert agency in that environment. ‘Today’s successful warlords’, writes Mark Duffield, ‘think globally but act locally’. They are indeed able to ‘act financially and politically in the international system without interference from the state in which [they are] based’ while exerting authority at the local level. The warlords’ political success (and legitimacy) in part rests on their ability to conduct their own foreign policy in ways that are otherwise reserved to sovereign states (through high-level diplomacy for example), as well as on their ability to conduct relations with (and infiltrate) their own state.

The CIA proxy militias have been committing war crimes in Afghanistan by killing innocent and unarmed women and children since the US and NATO so called war against terrorism. These militias were established not to crush Taliban and the Al Qaeda terrorist groups, but to punish Afghans for their love with their country. All but, 20 years later, the CIA, Pentagon and NATO are still running the business of killings and torture, support Taliban and the ISIS terrorist groups, and plundering mineral resources of Afghanistan with impunity. The CIA’s army was not designed for classic counterinsurgency operations and definitely not for winning-hearts-and-minds. Their mission was to humiliate and kill Afghans. In 2015, the US army helped the National Directorate of Security (NDS), to establish its own militias to fight the Taliban terrorist group. Analysts and researcher, Astri Suhrke1 and Antonio De Lauri (21 august 2019) in their paper highlighted collaboration between CIA and NDS, and operational mechanism of their militias:

The new NDS unit added significantly to the total number of irregular forces supported by the CIA. Two years later, in 2017, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo publicly announced that a policy change to use the militias more intensely was under way. The CIA would expand its operations in Afghanistan, targeting Taliban as well as al-Qaeda. Small teams of CIA-rostered officers would spread out alongside Afghan units in a campaign the Director promised would be aggressive, unforgiving, and relentless. The CIA’s Army: Who Are They and How Do They Operate? Little is publicly known about the CIA’s Afghan army. Nevertheless, investigative journalists, concerned analysts and human rights activists have pieced together the covert program’s basic outlines. The army has two types of components. One is a set of older units whose relations with the CIA go back to the offensive operations carried out during and immediately after the 2001 invasion. They work closely with the agency. The most well-known and powerful of these is the Khost Protection Force (KPF), which operates out of the CIA’s Camp Chapman in the northeastern province of Khost. Importantly, the KPF is an illegal armed group in the sense that its existence has no basis in Afghan law and no formal place in the state security apparatus or its budget, as the UN has emphasized. A second type of unit is the formally designated Special Forces of the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). It has four main units, numbered from 01, and each has a regional area of operation: NDS-01 operates in the Central Region, NDS-02 in the Eastern Region, NDS-03 in the Southern Region, and NDS04 in the North.

After ten years of its establishment, the Afghan local police (ALP) was undermined due to its failure to stabilize remote regions of the country. The police operated like a criminal militia-killing farmers, traders and businessmen. And it was a controversial force since its inception. Only 30,000 weak, untrained and illiterate forces failed to counter the Taliban terrorist group. This project was implemented in a hurry, therefore, to become wealthy and rich, commanders of the ALP supported and facilitated insurgent and terrorist groups who crushed, rather than advanced, local security and stability. Analysts and experts of Afghanistan, researcher Kate Clark, Erica Gaston, Fazal Muzhary and Borhan Osman (July 2020) in their well-written paper noted aspects of its abusive action and corruption:

The significant record of abuses, corruption and criminality attached to the ALP ultimately contributed to the decision to wind up the force. Although the ALP may be ending, the idea of leveraging local communities into the counter-insurgency fight is not. A new local force, the Afghan National Army Territorial Force (ANA-TF or TF), was created in 2018 under the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and is currently 10,000 strong, while the even more thinly regulated Uprising Forces, managed by the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), have also been mobilised in various provinces. As a result of all of these different strands of mobilisation, by the closing stage of this research, it was not at all difficult to find areas in which three different types of local forces operated – the ALP, the ANA-TF and the Uprising Forces, each beholden to a different institutional master, the Ministry of Interior (MoI), MoD and NDS, respectively, and with different international backers. The lessons from the ten years of experimentation, missteps and learning from the ALP are thus still ripe for the moment in Afghanistan and very relevant for the many other theatres of conflict where international actors continue to support or even create local forces.

The US proxy militias caused consternation, destruction in all provinces of Afghanistan. The US established an incompetent intelligence agency (NDS) to serve its interest. The NDS established regional militias to support the CIA and Pentagon war crime mission. The NDS established Unit-01 for Central Region, Unit-02 for Eastern Region, Unit-03 for Southern Region, and Unit-04, as a Khost Protection Force (KPF), and committed war crimes in these regions with the support of the US army and CIA. Analysts and researchers, Antonio De Lauri & Astri Suhrke in their recent paper on US proxy militias have documented some aspects of these militias:

The most well-known and powerful of these is the Khost Protection Force (KPF), which operates out of the CIA’s Camp Chapman in the northeastern province of Khost. Significantly, the KPF is an illegal armed group in the sense that its existence has no basis in Afghan law and no formal place in the state security apparatus or its budget, as the UN has emphasized. A second type of unit is the formally designated Special Forces of the Afghan intelligence agency, the NDS. There are four main units, numbered from 01 through 04, each with its own regional area of operation: NDS-01 operates in the Central Region, NDS-02 in the Eastern Region, NDS-03 in the Southern Region, and NDS-04 in the Northern Region. This is the only transparent and publicly known part of their organization. The NDS Special Forces exist in a regulation twilight zone. The NDS is heavily funded by the CIA, and its Special Forces have a close working relationship with CIA operatives: according to most reports, they are trained and paid directly by the CIA......There is no public disclosure of the size of the CIA-supported units, but they probably have more than doubled since the estimate of 3,000 given by Woodward in 2010. A journalist maintained in 2017 that NDS-02 alone had 1,200 men. Among the older units, the KPF was said to have 4,000 members in 2015. Three years later, in 2018, estimates of the KPF size were ‘anywhere from 3,000 to over 10,000. Other than that, all we know is that the CIA sponsored forces are uniformed and well equipped, sometimes work with men who speak American English during raids, use American phrases, and have been able to call in air strikes, most of which are executed by the American military. The paramilitary forces are also very well paid, which may be a principal reason why highly skilled and capable Afghans would want to join the units. The secrecy of the CIA program greatly compounds the difficulties of ascertaining facts about civilian casualties and related violence involving pro government forces.

Another militia that fought in Syria alongside Hezbollah and Syrian army returned to Afghanistan. Fatemiyoun militia consisted of Afghan Shia fighters prompting fears that Iran could mobilize the proxy group to target U.S. interests in Afghanistan. Now, in the presence of all these powerful militias, how can we expect peace and stability in Afghanistan? On 06 September 2020, Afghanistan noted in its editorial page: Nizamuddin Qaisari, a commander of public uprising forces, charged with violation of human rights was arrested two times but released without facing any consequences. At this juncture, relying on militia commanders for security would be a lame and mistaken move. The least one can learn from the four decades of war is that distributing weapons to illegal groups has proven to be a failed experiment.

Musa Khan Jalalzai

London

Chapter 1

From Rebel to Quasi-State: Governance, Diplomacy and Legitimacy in the Midst of Afghanistan’s Wars (1979–2001)

Romain Malejacq

Abstract

How do warlords build their legitimacy and eventually exert authority? The case of Afghan leader Ahmad Shah Massoud demonstrates that warlords do not only build legitimacy through the internal provision of goods and services to the population under their control, but also build their legitimacy by projecting authority externally, through the development of their own form of diplomacy. In this article, I show that warlords develop complex and complementary legitimisation strategies that extend beyond their territorial realms to include consequential relationships with foreign actors.

Keywords: Afghanistan; warlords; rebel governance; rebel diplomacy; quasi-states; Ahmad Shah Massoud; Soviet–Afghan war

Academics and journalists alike have long singularised warlords for their self-service nature. In this view, warlords are ‘driven overwhelmingly by personal power, glory and monetary gain’,¹ the raison d’être of warlordism.² It is widely assumed that warlords do not use resources for the purpose of building or consolidating a distinct political community, that they do not govern. Warlords are not only considered illegitimate on the domestic political scene, they are also viewed as irrelevant on the international one.³ Yet, and these actors cannot be reduced to mere local bandits and criminals. In this article, I retrace the political trajectory of Afghan warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud to show, first, that warlords can provide crucial services in certain ‘politico-security environments’⁴ (governance) and, second, that they can operate in the international system, through the development of their own kind of diplomacy.

I argue that warlords use their ability to both govern and conduct diplomacy as complementary legitimisation strategies that allow them to consolidate their political authority and eventually survive in challenging environments. Warlords can be defined as astute political entrepreneurs with a proven ability to organise violence and the faculty to both exert and transform authority across different realms (ideological, economic, military, social and political) and at different levels of political affairs (local, national and international). They rise in places like Afghanistan, Somalia and Syria, when they can be seen as restoring order and protecting the population against the violence and mayhem of failed and failing states, in which ‘[distrust has become] more salient and consequential’⁵ and people tend to rely primarily on family and kin, ethnic, tribal or otherwise. It is in these situations, when the state no longer holds the monopoly of legitimate physical violence and is not able to provide those crucial services, or when ‘its reputation as a defender of its population’⁶ has been damaged, that warlords strive and survive.

Warlords do not only provide security, protection and trust. Their authority is not limited to the military sphere, for ‘functional differentiations between politics, economics, and the military are virtually non-existent’⁷ in failed and failing states. Warlords provide ‘alternative forms of governance’,⁸ not necessarily conceived as a normative concept associated with ‘good’ and ‘democratic’ governance, but rather as the act of governing, the way power is being exercised. Governance is ‘a mix of all kinds of governing efforts by all manner of social-political actors, public as well as private; occurring between them at different levels, in different governance modes and orders’.⁹ Not only do warlords at times provide public services, but they also have a proven track record of providing governance, which in turn contributes to the legitimisation of their authority. The social capital that these actors use to construct and legitimise their authority is based upon their charisma and military strength and operationalised through the provision of services and other benefits to people under their control.

This is governance, but not governance as most states (particularly contemporary states) conceive it to be. Warlords also develop complex survival and legitimisation strategies beyond their territorial realms to include consequential (and largely under-researched) interactions with the state and international actors. They conduct their own kind of warlord diplomacy, a distinctive form of diplomacy that exploits personal networks as much as it does formal ties and is conducted to enhance personal authority. This suggests that warlord diplomacy is not only a ‘wartime tactic’¹⁰ or a way to acquire political capital within the international system¹¹ but also a legitimisation strategy aimed at strengthening one’s personal authority internally. Schlichte and Schneckener argue that non-state armed actors must rely on compatible, even mutually reinforcing sources of legitimacy in order to gain and maintain power.¹²

In this article, I highlight ‘reinforcing feedback effects between domestic and international support’¹³ and argue that warlord diplomacy and ‘delivery-based legitimisation’¹⁴ are both compatible and complementary. Methodologically, this article draws on over 200 semi-structured repeat interviews with prominent political actors (warlords, governors, ministers, diplomats, etc.) I conducted in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2015,¹⁵ as part of a larger comparative project.¹⁶ I asked my interviewees detailed and previously prepared open-ended questions about their life histories and then ‘pursued topics in depth as seemed appropriate and relevant’.¹⁷While existing work on ‘rebel diplomacy’ focuses on armed groups and organisations,¹⁸ looking at individual leaders allows me to conduct careful process tracing of the ways these individuals–and Massoud in particular–evolved, transformed their power and developed successful survival strategies throughout their political careers, rebels one day, quasi-state leaders the next.

This method further allows me to shift the focus from ‘rebel diplomacy’, ‘a rebel group’s conduct of foreign affairs during civil war for the purpose of advancing its military and political objectives’,¹⁹ to warlord diplomacy. This work is divided into three sections. In the first section, I show that warlords like Massoud have the ability to operate in the international system and conduct their own form of diplomacy. The following sections follow a chronological order and focus on Ahmad Shah Massoud’s political trajectory and legitimisation strategies: first as a rebel, from the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan war in 1979 up to the fall of the communist regime in 1992, a period during which Massoud captured a (well-disposed) community to create a governance structure for the regions under his control while simultaneously projecting authority externally, through the development of his own foreign policy; then as the de facto leader of a quasi-state, from the fall of the communist regime up to his assassination on 9 September 2001, a period during which he enjoyed official recognition but lost control of most of his territory and during which the structure he had created earlier kept operating in parallel to the central state.

Warlords in the international system

Warlords may have ‘intruded upon international relations’, they remain excluded from systemic analyses.²⁰ In fact, ‘much of the academic analysis of warlordism has been developed at the comparative level and there is a paucity of research on warlordism at the level of the international system’.²¹ Those who conceive of warlords as actors of the international system are often limited in the way they see international links, as they privilege clandestine networks and do not consider how warlords try to influence the interests of international actors through diplomacy.²² Diplomacy is widely understood as ‘the strategic use of talk by states’²³ and by states only, hence depriving non-state armed actors of an important source of legitimisation. I argue that warlords have the ability to conduct diplomacy and operate in the international system. They operate as alternative providers of governance; challenge the ‘idea of the state’²⁴ and the existence of a social contract; and participate in shaping the process of state formation. Warlords therefore affect the process of state evolution and impact the interstate system.²⁵ If one conceives of states as ‘makers and maintainers of boundaries’ between different spheres (public/private, licit/illicit, legal/illegal, etc.) and territories, warlords can be considered ‘creatures of the borderlands, growing up in regions where states and empires [are] both needy and inexpert’.²⁶

States in turn have an interest in using the warlords’ ability to arbitrage, that is, to ‘take advantage of a price differential for political, economic, and cultural goods across terrains’ as part of their own extraversion strategies.²⁷ While warlords are tied to their previous territorial control, their local authority gives them leverage among international actors. They take advantage of the complexity and heterogeneity of the international system, in which many competing actors with a variety of domestic and foreign policy agendas coexist and operate in a system where ‘subjects are governed by a complex hodgepodge of foreign powers, international and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), and domestic institutions’.²⁸

Though warlords ‘interact with a constellation of national and international actors who rigidly structure the political environment’²⁹ they have the ability to operate and exert agency in that environment. ‘Today’s successful warlords’, writes Mark Duffield, ‘think globally but act locally’.³⁰ They are indeed able to ‘act financially and politically in the international system without interference from the state in which [they are] based’³¹ while exerting authority at the local level. The warlords’ political success (and legitimacy) in part rests on their ability to conduct their own foreign policy in ways that are otherwise reserved to sovereign states (through high-level diplomacy for example), as well as on their ability to conduct relations with (and infiltrate) their own state. The warlords’ faculty to reinvent themselves over time (from rebel to quasi-state leader, for example) partly depends on their position in the international system.

They reject the internal hierarchy on which the existence of the Weberian state is based, conduct their own diplomacy (in which the concepts of domestic and international undergo a shift) and enter the international system de facto, while instrumentalising and subordinating elements of the state. At times, they accumulate resources and attempt to replace the state (as rebels). At other times, they rule in a mutual understanding with and along the central state. Warlords are actors who construct political authority on a different plane from the state. They exist on the same territory, but their realms of authority do not coincide entirely. In that sense, they may exercise a type of authority that is more flexible and durable than that of the state in the broader context of instability and violence.

The Rebel Leader (1979–1992)

Rebel governance

Ahmad Shah Massoud was born in 1952 in the Panjshir valley town of Jangalak, north of Kabul. His father was a Colonel in the Afghan Royal Army of King Zahir Shah. His grandfather, Yahya Khan, was a well-respected elder who had also worked for the king. The Massoud family held prestige and reputation and belonged to the highly respected Sarkarda tribe. Ahmad Shah’s mother came from a prominent Panjshiri family of the Bakshi tribe. Like most children of military families, Ahmad Shah Massoud had to move regularly and live in different parts of the country, until his father was eventually assigned to a position in Kabul, where Massoud attended the Lycée Istiqlal and learned to speak French.

In the early 70s, after he had failed getting in military school, he enrolled at the Kabul Polytechnic Institute for Engineering and Architecture, where he became increasingly involved with the student wing of Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-e Islami (Jamiat), a political party inspired from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood that aimed at establishing a state founded on the principles of Sharia law.³² On 17 July 1973, supported by a fraction of the military and by leftist parties who had grown dissatisfied with the government’s failure to improve the country’s overall living standards, infrastructures and public services, Mohammed Daoud Khan, King Zahir Shah’s cousin (and long-time political rival), staged a (bloodless) coup that ended the Afghan monarchy. The coup, in conjunction with the rise of Islamist and communist radicalism, marked the beginning of political instability in the country and directly triggered the beginning of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s political career.

After Daoud took power in 1973, his new government started imprisoning radical Islamists. Most of them (including Massoud and Rabbani) fled to Pakistan, where the Pakistani authorities, eager to install a friendly regime in Kabul, started providing Massoud and others with secret military training. In 1975, Massoud joined with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the founders of the Jamiat’s student wing, in a revolt against Daoud’s regime. His role was to start the uprising in the Panjshir, but he largely failed, due, he believed, to a lack of support from the local population. Massoud returned to exile in Pakistan; Hekmatyar split from the Jamiat to create his own party, the Hezb-e Islami, now considering Massoud, who had remained loyal to the Jamiat’s leader Burhanuddin Rabbani, as his most dangerous enemy.³³

In April 1978, the pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power in a coup against Daoud’s regime, causing uncoordinated uprisings all across the country. In December 1979, this was followed by the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, in an attempt to support and ultimately steer the new communist regime, in a classic cold war fashion. Massoud, then in his mid-20s, returned to the Panjshir to stir up a revolt against the new communist government. Others undertook similar action, either on behalf of Rabbani and the Jamiat, like Massoud, or under a different political banner. In the meantime, the leaders of all these different political parties remained in Peshawar, Pakistan, where they could gather support from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and, indirectly, the United States (US)–which, in the context of the cold war, started a covert action program to support the Afghan holy warriors (mujahideen) in their war against the Soviet Union.

These political leaders would then redistribute the weapons and financial resources they received to their commanders based in different parts of Afghanistan, thus fostering the creation of a strong, but highly fragmented, resistance movement in the country.³⁴ Massoud showed up in the Panjshir with only a very limited number of men. Yet, this time, he did not arrive unannounced. The failure of 1975 had made him very well aware of the importance of local legitimacy. Learning from his mistakes, Massoud had carefully prepared his return, sending representatives to